THE END (OF DEER) IS NEAR

            Well, you’ve surprised me again. The page-view statistics on the deer posts—despite all the pictures—are depressingly low. So I’m going to give you the fast take on the rest of the plants deer eat only if desperate, and move on. If the clamor for more illustrated deer-resistant plants becomes unbearable, I may oblige. I'm not, however, holding my breath.

            But first, some breaking news for St. Paddy's Day.

     ·         If you’ve been on an extended trip to Outer Mongolia or the Falkland Islands, you may not have heard that the USDA published its revised cold-hardiness zone map last month. To view it, click on the highlighted text. Take heart, global-warming catastrophists: the US isn’t really all that warmer—this go-round, the boys at Agriculture just crunched twice as many years of temperature data than the mere 15 they used to develop the original map. They included readings from lots more reporting stations as well, resulting in a more accurate picture of average winter temperatures. The map is just a tool anyway, advisory in nature. No one knows better than you what winter is like in your yard.

·      Attention, citizen-astronomers! Globe at Night is running its third observation period of 2012 from March 13^th to the 22^nd. This time, Northern Hemisphere viewers can opt for either Leo or Orion: Sky-Guy recommends looking at Leo for people in dark-sky areas. Bright red star Regulus makes him easy to locate. Making the great lion even easier to spot, Mars is cruising through the constellation this month. So get out there and do your bit to help map global light pollution.

·       The vernal equinox occurs on Tuesday, March 20^th, as the sun passes over the celestial equator from south to north at 1:14 am EDT.

    ·       The World Wildlife Federation is holding its sixth annual Earth Hour, a climate-change awareness vigil, on March 31 beginning at 8:30 pm local time. Originating in Australia in 2006, the idea is shut off your lights and other electricity-sucking devices for at least an hour “…in a collective display of commitment to a better future for the planet,” says the website (linked above). Many places turn the evening into an outdoor, candle-lit social event, to spread awareness of sustainability issues. Personally, I’m dubious about the prospects of people coming together to save the planet; but what harm to savor an almost-April evening outside in the dark?

*****

               Okay, let’s wrap up Bambi.

(Click on these photos to make them larger)

            Deer don’t eat grass. Any grass. This is one characteristic that makes them not-cows. Here’s a picture of an ornamental grasses garden Tim and I designed on the edge of a swamp. It’s full of Leymus, various Miscanthus, Acorus, and Panicum: so full, in fact, that we were able to slip in a few Knock Out roses that the deer, discouraged by all that yucky grass, never ventured in to find. That’s one for our side.


               Following the same path of deception, here’s a planting that surrounds a deer-candy daylily with less-tasty perennials: (clockwise from bottom left) ‘Icicles’ veronica; ‘Blue Midnight’ penstemon, Siberian iris, seashore mallow, butterfly weed, stokes asters, and ‘Pretoria’ canna lily. It’s pretty, and the daylily blooms are shielded from depredations.

       

            Non-starving deer also give palm trees a pass. I have to say I agree with them here: most palms are notoriously difficult to site in non-tropical landscapes so that they don’t jar with everything else. I find most of them rather ugly and/or ungainly, but that’s a topic for another day.

            In fact, most trees hold little attraction as forage for Bambi. Bucks in rut, however, can damage bark or uproot young deciduous specimens as they rub the velvet off their antlers.

Veg garden temptation

      
            The bad news is that, with rare exceptions (rhubarb, for example, or grassy crops like wheat), anything we grow to eat ourselves also pleases deer. Vegetable gardens in areas under pressure from local herds require sturdy fencing and/or continual patrol by large dogs. Another option is to grow edibles in containers in places deer can be excluded from—like hanging baskets or on gated decks.

      

            As my list of deer-resistant plants kept (keeps) growing, I realized that deer-browsed landscapes result from a) a herd that’s out-populated its habitat; and/or b) a serious lack of imagination on the part of the gardener. There’s not much you can do about a), but b) is entirely within your control.

The garden in March

      By way of example, consider the evolution of the property of our friends, Gen and Ed. Gen believes wholeheartedly in co-existing peaceably with nature. Ed believes wholeheartedly in co-existing peaceably with Gen. Their park-like yard includes several deer trails, to which their gnawed original ornamental plantings bore witness. Over the years, however, we’ve worked together to gently encourage Bambi to dine elsewhere. Here is a picture of the garden at one terminus of the trail in March, full of poisonous daffodils, prickly foliaged ‘Baths Pink’ dianthus and other plants safely off deer menus.

Same garden in August

    And here is the same garden in August, home to ornamental grasses, ‘Goldsturm’ black-eyed Susans, Mexican bush sage (Salvia leucantha), coleus, and pentas. The deer just walk on by.

Rock garden

       Here’s the periphery of the same property. The tricky footing caused by the granite rip-rap strewn throughout the garden works with a lovely and low-maintenance planting of ‘Blue Pacific’ juniper, more ‘Baths Pink’ dianthus, coleus, society garlic and yaupon holly to make browsing uncommon.

    We even found a way for Ed to have some of the roses he loves, even though the flowers act like deer magnets: planting standards in pots did the trick.

 

'New Dawn' rose, unchewed

          If you find you can’t live without deer-candy, get around Bambi by growing his favorite noshes out of his reach. I’m training a ‘Zéphrine Drouhin’ rose to swag across our front porch, and jury-rigged a fantastically ugly chicken-wire arch for ‘New Dawn’ to grow over.

'Majestic Beauty' Indian hawthorn

       Plants trained or top-grafted into tree-forms (called “standards” in the trade) are another way to have your deer-cake and Bambi not eat it too. Here is a standardized ‘Majestic Beauty’ Indian hawthorn…

'Tardiva' standard hydrangea

…and a pee-gee ‘Tardiva’ hydrangea growing above the chewing-level of our scrubby little coast deer.

Take that, Bambi!

              Also consider containers hung out of reach, or kept in deer-proof enclosures.

A group of azaleas protected 
by nearly invisible fishing line

         If your yard’s full of hawthorns, pittosporums, euonymus, daylilies, roses, hostas, tulips and Oriental lilies, you can try the standard repellent methods—stinky sprays, grated Irish Spring soap, netting, bags of human hair or garlic-oil "pens" tied to susceptible shrubs, predator-urine stakes and fencing. Tim and I know some folks who mounted motion-activated dog-whistle-like devices in strategic spots around their yard one spring to good initial effect. Alas, the deer took to wearing earplugs or something, because by midsummer the devastation had resumed. You can keep deer out by stringing fishing line from tree to tree—or stake to stake—at chest height (theirs, not yours) around susceptible vignettes. The ultimate deterrent is, of course, a large dog.

"Cool Cola" defending the yard
(thanks to Labrador Retriever Pictures)

All these things work, but each has its trade-offs. Sprays can be expensive and must be reapplied regularly; soap’s cheaper, but you still have to be out there, grating away. Plants grow up through netting, failing to protect the tender new growth deer like best. Bushes festooned with bags of hair are soooo unattractive. Garlic pens and predator-urine stakes need replacing, although you probably won’t notice until the morning after the deer return. Fences work great but are a) expensive, b) ugly, or c) both. The sound devices, powered by four C-cell batteries, need frequent battery checks and replacements, and then the deer become accustomed to the sound anyway. Nearly invisible fishing line can cause tripping, and, in our litigious society, possible lawsuits. For those not inclined toward pet ownership, deer depredations may seem less harrowing than the rigors of life with Fido. 

In the March 2008 issue of The Avant Gardener, editor Thomas Powell wrote of experiments conducted by the USDA National Wildlife Research Center using hydrolyzed milk protein, called casein, to render plants unpalatable to Bambi. Apparently, casein is a common component of baby powder. The down side of this economical deer repellant (there’s always a down side) lies in how it’s applied. You have to mix the powder with some kind of adherent to make it stick to the leaves before spraying it on your plants. The article mentions commercial agricultural latex or—I’m not kidding—Elmer’s Glue-All. The mental picture I get of what baby powder, glue and water look like when applied to foliage is not pretty.

      
          The main goal of all repellents is to induce Bambi to change restaurants. Do keep in mind that hungry deer will eat anything. They also become inured to any one deterrent technique after a while. That’s why Tim and I advocate for planting things deer don’t particularly like in the first place. In the long run, it’s easier. 

 
        Don’t let the bastards get you down. And thanks for dropping by.

                                                            Kathy

P.S.—For the seven readers who found the plants lists mildly interesting, there’s a supplemental post of the entire thing (sans pictures) following this one.

LET THERE BE LIGHT

            I’m a light person. The more light, the better, as far as I’m concerned. Tim’s and my little house is painted oyster white throughout, with bright white woodwork. Makes it airy and spacious-feeling. My mom liked to paint her walls different colors, changing one room or another every other year or so. As adults, most of my sisters followed suit, doing their parts to keep Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore in business. I took the road less traveled. I like white. I like light.

            Much good news for light-lovers this weekend. The moon went full on Saturday at 2:10 p.m. and the vernal equinox occurred at 7:18 p.m. this evening.

Every month’s full moon carries a descriptive name derived from various folklores. March’s is known as the Worm, Sap or Crow Moon. (I understand “Sap,” but Sky-Guy didn’t explain where “Worm” and “Crow” come from.) The March moon traditionally decides the date of the primo Christian holiday, Easter, based on a third-century formula called the Computus. Like many carved-in-stone rules, it has been modified over the years. Most recently—in 1583—Pope Gregory XIII decreed that henceforth Easter would fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. That’s not at all arbitrary, is it? Unlike Christmas, whose date was fixed to coincide with pagan solstice celebrations even though biblical scholars have long held that Jesus was most likely born in early spring.

            Be all that as it may, this year the March moon falls the day before the equinox, moving the so-called Pascal Moon forward 28 days. Accordingly, Easter occurs about as late in the year as possible, on April 24.

The weekend’s full moon also coincided with a perigee of the lunar cycle, which means the full moon rose within an hour of it being the closest to Earth it’s going to get this year, or a mere 356,577 kilometers. (The most distant apogee happens only 16 days later, on April 2, when the moon will recede to 406,655 klicks away from Earth. That’s a difference of 50,078 kilometers, or about 31,048 miles. Isn’t this astronomy stuff fascinating?) Apparently, the full-moon-at-perigee phenomenon isn’t all that common: the last time it happened was March 8, 1993. Sky-Guy says the perceived diameter of the moon varies by 15% or so, smaller at apogee, larger at perigee. Tim and I decided to check it out.



Saturday night's
"Super" moon



After dinner, we drove to a local beach for the show. Although the thermometer hit 80° during the afternoon, by 7 p.m. the northeasterly breeze freshened: down on the strand, it was cold. (In retrospect, I probably should have worn shoes. Or at least socks.) Nonetheless, we stuck it out. A small crowd congregated on the highest point of the boardwalk to the beach, cameras at the ready to capture what Sky-Guy calls “Moon illusion.” At 7:45, a red disc edged over the roofs of the houses.

Well, she was pretty, all right, but I wouldn’t call her a “super” moon. As she cleared the last roof-ridge, T and I opted to go home and make a pot of coffee. I planned to pour mine on my feet.



Here is a diagram of the
celestial coordinate system.
Note the ecliptic circle,
which is at a 23-&-a-half-degree
angle to the galactic equator.
Or something like that.



The astronomical beginning of spring, the vernal equinox, means more to me. Equinox occurs at the moment the sun reaches an ecliptic longitude of zero degrees, which has more to do with the celestial sphere than that old saw about the sun crossing the geographical equator so everywhere on the planet experiences 12 hours of daylight. That’s piffle, of course. Oak Island’s 12-hour day occurred on March 17^th. Today we enjoyed 12 hours and eight minutes between sun rise and set. I don’t really understand the concept of the ecliptic and other celestial coordinates, so I snipped a diagram of the system. You can puzzle it out for yourselves.

I’m just glad it’s officially spring.

*****

Light affects all life on earth in various ways. We’re all subject to circadian rhythms, for instance. Webster defines circadian—from the Latin “circa” (around) and “diem” (day)—as “designating or of behavioral or physiological rhythms associated with the 24-hour cycles of the earth’s rotation, as, in man, the regular metabolic, glandular and sleep rhythms which may persist through dislocations of day and night…” I understand the concept viscerally, as I have just acclimated to the advent of Daylight Savings Time. Every year, I experience springing forward and falling back as jet-lag.

 But there are other light effects, most clearly demonstrated by plants.

First there is phototropism, or the hormone-induced bending of plant structures toward a source of light, either natural or artificial. Sunflowers are the best-known example of flowers that orient themselves in relation to the sun, a related phenomenon called heliotropism.



The tomato seedlings on my piano
lean toward the light source.
This is called phototropism.



The biological mechanisms behind photo- and heliotropism are amazing. Motion is accomplished by specialized potassium-pumping cells in a flexible segment, called the pulvinus, just below a flowerhead or in a plant’s stem. In the presence of blue light rays, potassium ions change the turgor pressure in nearby tissues. On the shady side of the stem or flower, increased rigidity causes elongation of the pulvinus cells, causing the plant to “follow” the light.  

Little miracles happen around us all the time, don’t they?

*****

One can have too much of a good thing, however.

I belong to the generation of sun worshippers who saw nothing odd in slathering ourselves with iodine mixed in baby oil before taking off as much clothing as our mothers would allow and settling ourselves in the backyard or on the beach to broil. Why I don’t resemble a raisin today, 40 years on, is another of those quotidian miracles.

Tim’s dermatologist, a transplant from Rochester, New York, once remarked that he saw more cases of skin cancer in his first two years working in Brunswick County, North Carolina, than in the 25-plus years he practiced up north. This is an important observation, and one worth giving some thought to. “Full sun” on the southeastern coast is an entirely different animal from “full sun” in Connecticut or Ohio, and the difference affects both plants and people. Pot geraniums (Pelargonium spp. cvv.), for instance, welcome summertime southern and western exposures up north; but down here, don’t even think about it past, say, mid-June. Your skin has a lot in common with geraniums that way, so take proper precautions when you go out at all times of the year, even if you’ve got “good” skin.

Sunflowers provide the best-known
example of heliotropism

            Interestingly enough, Tim and I represent opposite ends of the skin continuum. He characterizes himself as “Irish iridescent blue.” He’s had several skin cancers removed—basal cell, squamous cell and one very scary pre-Stage I melanoma—since we moved to North Carolina in 1997. He now anoints all exposed skin daily with sunscreen containing titanium dioxide to thwart both UVA and UVB rays, never ventures out shirtless or barefoot, rarely wears shorts, and always keeps his head covered.

            I, on the other hand, have marvelous skin. Naturally a kind of honey color, I tan readily and hardly ever burn. (I’m not bragging. The Good-Skin Fairy smiled upon me at birth, so it’s not a circumstance I had any control over. And, because there is balance in the cosmos, the Good-Fingernail Fairy loathed me at first sight.) Nonetheless, my Southern-Belle upbringing—most of which didn't take—makes me sensitive to the responsibility of maintaining my good fortune. My face has not left the house without sunscreen (or mascara) since the 1970s, not counting the two ill-thought-out two-a.m. trips to the hospital forced on me by childbirth. Since the ’90s, I’ve extended coverage to all exposed skin. Here are links to the skin-saving products depicted nearby: Rocky Mountain Sunscreen; Oil of Olay Complete Facial Moisturizer and Lubriderm Daily Moisture Lotion (both SPF 15); and Burt’s Bee’s Lip Protection. I also rarely wear shorts when we’re working, but that’s mostly because I like to give the deer ticks and chiggers as small a target as possible.



Protect your skin, every day



            I also wear a hat, at my doctor’s behest and not because I look good in one. He advises me that everyone, particularly light-eyed folks, need to protect their eyes from glare. He also recommends sunglasses to go with the hat, but I don’t do sunglasses. It’s up to the visor of my Fitzgeralds Gardening ball-cap to defend my baby-blues against incipient retinal harm. If you are not sunglasses-phobic like me (I have my reasons), so much the better.

            One other quick note on sun protection—and I’m deadly serious about this topic despite my jocular tone: Rit, the washing-machine fabric-dye people, makes a laundry additive called Sun Guard that increases the SPF of most of your clothing from about 6, in the case of cotton, to 30. (It won’t work on polyester, but no one wears polyester anymore. Do they?) I treat all Tim’s work shirts with it. It allegedly holds up to 20 washings, and Tim has enough shirts so, if kept in proper rotation, once in late March and once in July helps shield his back and stomach through high spring and summer. Did you know you can burn through your clothes?

*****

It’s spring now, the days are getting longer. We spend more time outside, the sun’s rays are stronger. It’s okay to love the light, but don’t be stupid about it, please.

Thanks for dropping by. See you next time.

                                                                     Kathy